Obtaining the location or position of a mobile device that is accessing a wireless network may be useful for many applications including, for example, emergency calls, personal navigation, asset tracking, locating a friend or family member, etc. Existing position methods include methods based on measuring radio signals transmitted from a variety of devices including satellite vehicles (SVs) and terrestrial radio sources in a wireless network such as base stations and access points. In methods based on terrestrial radio sources, a mobile device may measure the timing of signals received from two or more base stations and determine times of arrival, time differences of arrival and/or receive time-transmit time differences. Combining these measurements with known locations for the base stations and known transmission times from each base station may enable location of the mobile device using such position methods as Observed Time Difference Of Arrival (OTDOA) or Enhanced Cell ID (E-CID).
In general, E-CID is a relatively low complexity and popular positioning protocol for Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks. In an E-CID positioning protocol, a mobile device may share a cell ID of a serving cell to a location server (LS) along with additional parameters configured to enable the LS to estimate a position of the mobile device based on a 2D circular region of the cell coverage associated with the cell ID.